This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First…

Children's right to participate, at least in rhetoric, is well recognised, but what this means and the associated benefits in schools are less clear. This article synthesises findings of a large mixed-methods Australian study comprising policy analysis, qualitative interviews with students, teachers and policymakers, and the development of a…

This article considers the ways in which two senior secondary assessment policies that aim to be inclusive are enacted for students from refugee backgrounds. The final years of secondary school in Australia are shaped by high-stakes assessment requirements. Yet there have been policy moves in South Australia to be more inclusive of students by…

The OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030 (E2030) project's overall goal is that of looking to the future in terms of how school curricula should evolve given the technological advances and other changes that societies are now facing. Towards that end, the E2030 project centres on the idea that education needs to equip students with the…

In this paper, teachers' enactment of assessment policy within demands for accountability and consistency of teacher judgements is considered. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study involving 50 middle school teachers from Queensland, Australia, who participated in online social moderation meetings with teachers located in dispersed areas…

The "world culture" framework posits a convergence in the organisation of education across the world. On the other hand, scholars observing teaching practices inside classrooms find significant variation among nations and regions of the world. This study examined the global change patterns of classroom practices at the between- and…

The "Australian Curriculum: History" has emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features,…

In this discursive and wide-ranging paper I want to do two things: first, to interrogate the conditions that led to, and continue to wreak havoc as a result of, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and that underpin current policy approaches to teacher education in Australia and other western countries; and second, to move in the direction of…

In this study, a comprehensive educational effectiveness model is tested in relation to student's civic knowledge. Multilevel analysis was applied on the dataset of the IEA Civic Education Study (CIVED; Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001), which was conducted among junior secondary-school students (age 14), their schools, and their…

Recent scholarship has identified the emergence of a new modality of policy work: the mediatisation of policy. This paper provides an Australian case study which reports on the tactics of an Australian Federal Minister of Education and a media commentator who both engaged in public pedagogical work for the purpose of spinning education policy. In…

This article examines a Victorian high school's implementation of a new Year 9 program which was intended to interrupt a traditional academic curriculum and to create an imagined oasis of care and personal development for students. It explores ways in which (1) the existing culture and context of the school continues to frame the subjectivities of…

A great deal of educational policy proceeds as though teachers are malleable and ever-responsive to change. Some argue they are positioned as technicians who simply implement policy. However, how teachers go about their work and respond to reform agendas may be contingent upon many factors that are both biographical in nature and workplace…

The state of Middle Schooling in many Western countries has been described as under threat, at a crossroads and like a wasteland. Within Australia, it has also been claimed that the past generation focus on Middle Schooling is unfinished and exhausted. But a Middle Schooling movement continues in Australia that provides examples of a way out of a…

This qualitative case study of an exceptional school in the south of England challenges the hypothesis that transformational leaders significantly impact on student outcomes. Interviews with staff and students, together with classroom observation, confirm that the head, appointed in 1995, has played an important role in transforming internal…

The year 2006 has been a year in which a decision on the introduction of middle schools has been made by the Labor government of the Northern Territory. The initial impetus for the change came from the 2003 Secondary Education Review "Future Directions for Secondary Education in the Northern Territory," chaired by Gregor Ramsay. There…